The Sky After Dark team also regularly interviews far-right figures who have big social media followings in own their countries. You would expect it would be a driving force in producing content,” he saidĬopland is looking into where Sky’s videos are being shared through Facebook and the extent to which they are being picked up by far-right groups, like Infowars. “The views on YouTube would be making them money. Simon Copland, a PhD researcher at the Australian National University who is studying extremist and far-right content online, said certain types of programs appear to be going well: conspiracy theories on Covid-19 with particular emphasis on it being developed in a Chinese lab the “stolen” US election Hunter Biden’s email and laptop scandal and Joe Biden’s mental capacity.
The themes of the top-rating videos on Sky’s YouTube channel – some of which have had as many as 8m views – appear to be deliberately designed to trigger the international conspiracy crowd. The internal data on shows that around 30% of total views are coming from overseas, mainly from the US. Much of the growth in traffic is believed to be coming from the US – and the sharp spikes for particular videos are almost certainly from overseas viewers. Wilson also reported that Sky’s Facebook posts had more total interactions in October than the ABC News, SBS News, 7News Australia, 9 News and 10 News First pages, and more shares than all of them combined.Īs well, data obtained by the Guardian from inside Sky shows that the company got an average of 5.2m views of its videos via its site each month between October 2020 and February this year. On YouTube, their videos have been viewed more than 500m times, more than any other Australian media organisation. Last November, tech journalist Cam Wilson revealed in Business Insider that Sky News Australia had successfully built a Fox News-like online operation in Australia that dwarfs its terrestrial audience numbers. Via Foxtel, Sky News attracts audiences of just 50,000-80,000 to its most popular commentators such as Alan Jones – just a tenth of the audience of a program like the ABC’s 7.30.īut this ignores the viewership and influence that Sky is winning via digital platforms. Most politicians see Sky as a niche broadcaster with a relatively small audience. Some recent reports are arguably fully down the rabbit hole of conspiracy thinking. What clearly is doing best on these channels is material that takes on the language of conspiracy thinking to dog-whistle to the conspiracy-minded, using the buzzwords of QAnon and other rightwing groups. The bite-sized videos carry advertising – and Sky shares the revenue with platforms like YouTube. Helmed by former Daily Telegraph journalist Jack Houghton, the digital offerings of Sky, particularly from the After Dark commentators, are being pushed out on Facebook, YouTube and on News Corp-owned websites. What he doesn’t mention is that over the past 12 months, the News Corp-owned channel has gone down what appears to be a deliberate path of pandering to the conspiracy-minded to drive its digital strategy.Ġ1:02 Rowan Dean denounces 'Great Reset' on Sky News – video When they wanted context, commentary and analysis of events, they turned to the nation’s best commentators on Sky News.” Sky’s CEO, Paul Whittaker, described Sky’s mission to Mediaweek last December as: “When Australians needed reliable, trustworthy and comprehensive news coverage, they turned to us in record numbers. At night, a new crowd comes on air and it morphs into a US Fox News-style lineup of commentators with a conservative bent, known as Sky After Dark, again with limited reach. During the day it delivers high-quality real-time news that is essential viewing for the political class. The traditional orthodoxy in Australia is that Sky is a news channel with a relatively modest audience. Simultaneously Sky in Australia is lurching further to the right, producing more segments and specials designed to pique the interest of the conspiracy-minded, including the far-right media in the US. Jones uses segments from Sky News Australia in his program, particularly those from Sky’s Outsiders program, as “evidence” from mainstream media organisations to support his conspiracy theories. In recent months, one of Jones’s favoured sources to back up his claims is Australia’s Sky News.
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